For Sniper Victim’s Family, Grief Lingers as Trial Starts

There are no memorials at the gas pump where Dean Meyers was gunned down a year ago. At dusk, traffic sweeps by pump four at the Battlefield Sunoco without any hint of menace. Drivers wait idly while their tanks fill, oblivious to the memory of the man whose killing will take center stage this week at the murder trial of serial sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad.

“They just stand there like it never happened,” said J.R. Rodriguez, the burly service station attendant who was on duty the night of Oct. 9, 2002, when Meyers toppled to the pavement in Virginia’s Prince William County, a suburban area 25 miles southwest of the nation’s capital.

An engineer who had stopped after work to gas up en route to his Maryland home, Meyers, 53, was the seventh of 10 victims killed during the three-week frenzy of long-range death. As grieving brothers buried the lifelong bachelor in rural Pennsylvania, snipers ranged like invisible men across the highways surrounding Washington, D.C., convulsing an entire metropolitan region in panic.

The fear has evaporated, but its public residue lingers.

Muhammad’s trial opens today in Virginia Beach, Va., shifted 200 miles away from the crime scene by a judge worried about finding an impartial jury. Prosecutors have filled a storeroom with evidence exhibits and will call scores of witnesses to press for Muhammad’s conviction and execution. The beleaguered defense team is struggling to overcome not only the government’s powerful circumstantial evidence and widespread media coverage, but also Muhammad’s taciturn defiance.

Muhammad, 42, a 1991 Gulf War veteran turned drifter, is charged separately from his co-defendant, Lee Boyd Malvo, 18, whose murder trial starts next month. While Malvo has admitted that he was the triggerman in many of the slayings and now plans to mount an insanity defense, Muhammad has said little to police and refuses to meet with psychiatric examiners.

Muhammad’s stony mien and bare-bones compliance are consistent with “a soldier’s affect,” said one lawyer who observed the suspect in jail. Like a prisoner of war volunteering nothing to his captors, Muhammad “has stayed disciplined, but it hasn’t helped him. You get the sense he’s playing soldier, someone who’s lost control but is desperately pretending that he still knows what to do.”

The jury-selection process that begins today could well become the most critical phase in Muhammad’s trial. Legal observers said his defense team would seek neutral jurors who remained unswayed by the terror of a year ago. Also, they would likely try to pick jurors sophisticated enough to understand the legal and moral nuances of capital punishment and willing to consider sparing Muhammad’s life if he is convicted.

The Muhammad trial -- which could last up to eight weeks and cost more than $1.2 million -- is expected to help explain why two drifters said to be on a cross-country armed-robbery spree allegedly began stalking humans as random targets.

Muhammad has been portrayed as a man consumed by fury after a failed marriage. There is also a possible financial motive: He and Malvo are accused of leaving notes at two shooting scenes in an attempt to extort $10 million to end the killings -- although the demands came well after nine victims had died.

The precise tipping point for Muhammad’s rage remains undefined. “These were a couple of low-rent losers. Why they did what they did is anybody’s guess,” said a senior official of the police task force that tracked down the sniper suspects.

“I can’t begin to imagine what would drive these people to hunt down my brother like an animal,” said Greg Meyers, 57, a graphic artist who lives five miles from his brother’s churchside grave in Perkiomenville, Pa.

It was Dean Meyers’ killing that allowed Prince William County prosecutors to try Muhammad on murder charges and seek his execution. After Muhammad and Malvo were arrested on a federal warrant last October, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft handed them over to Virginia authorities because both were eligible there for the death penalty.

Larry Meyers, an older brother of the slain man, has been summoned to appear as a prosecution witness. Another brother recently read a tribute to Dean Meyers at a memorial service for the sniper victims. But overwhelmed by raw memories, Greg Meyers plans to stay home during the trial, saying he’s “too broke up to talk about it in public.”

Everywhere he turns in his wooded town an hour north of Philadelphia, Greg Meyers finds haunting reminders of his brother. A sloping field where he walks his dogs once housed their old baseball diamond. A trip to his father’s toolshed turned up a faded sign from the boys club that Dean once headed.

Greg Meyers said he wanted Muhammad convicted quickly. “I just wish I could be a juror so I could have his fate in my hands,” he said. Like many, his mind is already made up.

“There’s a clear impression that the public has already made up its mind,” said John Zwerling, a veteran Virginia defense lawyer. “People from Tidewater travel the I-95 corridor all the time. They were just as terrified as the people in northern Virginia.”

The jury pool in Virginia Beach also tends to have a strong law-and-order cast. In a city that straddles Navy shipyards, more than a third of the adult population of 280,000 has ties to the military. “Our juries can be pretty conservative,” said Virginia Beach spokesman Dave Sullivan.

When the sniper killings ceased immediately after Muhammad and Malvo were captured on Oct. 24, 2002, a relieved public seemed to take their arrests as a sign of guilt. As prosecutors began assembling a formidable tapestry of evidence, newspaper and television accounts from Baltimore to Richmond, Va., devoted microscopic attention to the suspects and the evidence against them.

“The real challenge for the system now is to ensure that the jury is listening,” said James Wyda, a federal public defender in Baltimore who briefly represented Muhammad last year before the suspect was transferred to the custody of Virginia authorities.

The government will offer up spent bullet fragments and a now-infamous Bushmaster rifle allegedly used in the killings. There are extensive ballistics matches and an ancient Chevrolet Caprice allegedly used as a rolling sniper’s nest, its trunk gouged with turret holes.

The two men have been placed near the crime scenes by varied evidence -- a stolen laptop, a desktop organizer, witness sightings, DNA traces and fingerprints, even police traffic stops that brought them tantalizingly close to being captured before they allegedly killed again.

“We’ve been picking and choosing from hundreds of people interviewed across the country and thousands of pieces of evidence,” said James A. Willett, a member of the prosecution team led by county Commonwealth Atty. Paul B. Ebert.

Muhammad’s lawyers have raised a barrage of legal issues and complaints to seed uncertainty in jurors’ minds. They have questioned almost every prosecution move -- from the glaring lack of eyewitness accounts of the killings to the state’s use of a vaguely worded anti-terrorism law as legal underpinning for capital punishment.

Defense lawyers Peter D. Greenspun and Jonathan Shapiro argue that Muhammad cannot be put to death even if prosecutors are able to show his presence at almost every crime scene. No one saw him fire the rifle, they insist -- making Muhammad an accessory to Malvo, perhaps, but still not proving that he was a killer.

“Whether or not the commonwealth can prove that both men were involved in the murder is beside the point. A death sentence can only be imposed on the man who fired the shot,” the defense team wrote in one legal brief. Neither lawyer was available for comment.

Prosecutors charged Muhammad with murder under an untested state law that permits the death penalty in cases involving alleged terrorist acts. Under the law, passed by the Virginia Legislature after the Sept. 11 attacks, authorities can seek the death penalty against a suspect even if he did not fire a shot -- as long as the crime was meant to “injure the public or influence the government.”

“The broadness of those phrases is something the defense will clearly explore,” said prosecutor Willett. Prosecutors are confident that Prince William County Circuit Judge LeRoy F. Millette Jr. will uphold the statute. Millette has already rejected several defense motions seeking to overturn the state’s attempted use of the anti-terrorism law and the death penalty.

Muhammad’s lawyers also will have to contend with looming conflicts between their trial strategy and the legal course plotted by Malvo’s defense attorneys. In recent months, Malvo’s lawyers have repeatedly insisted the teenager had been “under the spell” of Muhammad during the killing spree. Their portrait of a brainwashed youth fits neatly with charges by chief prosecutor Ebert that Muhammad had acted as “captain” of a “killing team.”

On Thursday, Malvo’s lawyers said the teenager would plead not guilty by reason of insanity, saying his “indoctrination” by Muhammad had blossomed into mental illness. The move would leave Malvo acknowledging his involvement in the crimes, but not his guilt. At the same time, Muhammad continues to insist that it was the teenager who fired the rifle and committed the murders.

Legal observers said it was unlikely that Muhammad’s prosecutors would try to press Malvo to testify against his former mentor. Malvo’s insanity plea would undercut his credibility as a prosecution witness, and he would be a hostile witness for Muhammad’s defense team.

Last week, Muhammad also hindered his own case when he refused to meet with a court-ordered psychiatrist. Judge Millette responded by barring Muhammad from presenting any mental health testimony at trial -- a sanction that will prevent the suspect from mounting his own insanity defense.

Muhammad’s lawyers have yet to say whether they will challenge the ruling. But in hundreds of pages of legal motions and more than a dozen pretrial hearings, Greenspun and Shapiro have already paved the way for an extensive appeal if Muhammad is found guilty and sentenced to death.

“They’ve clearly been active,” said Zwerling, the veteran Virginia defense attorney. “They’re doing what good lawyers do.”

In Perkiomenville, a lawyer’s due diligence comes off as a bitter taunt to a man bereft of a younger brother. “Come on,” Greg Meyers said, his voice taut in misery. “Didn’t they find the gun? Didn’t the bullets match? Wasn’t his car seen at all those crime scenes?”

He has steeled himself for the news reports and the morning newspaper. He knows his pulse will race when he watches the trial unfold from the living room of his old stone house.

“What would really be bad would be to be down there and listen to all those lawyers,” he said. His voice grew listless.

“All I know is when we get together for Thanksgiving dinner, we’ll have one less plate,” he said. “No matter what they do to this guy, no matter what the jury says, it won’t bring Dean back.”